“When we are transparent about our flaws, we draw people in, we build trust, and we speed sales cycles.” – Todd Caponi in today’s Tip 319
Are you REALLY giving buyers what they need in your proposals to make a confident decision?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Todd Caponi is back. Todd is a top-rated keynote speaker and trainer as Principal of Sales Melon, LLC and he’s also Managing Director of Chicago’s VentureSCALE. Here he is with a proposal tip:
Todd Caponi: Hey everybody. Todd Caponi here, author of The Transparency Sale, and I want to talk to you about your proposals for a moment. So as we’ve talked about in past Daily Sales Tips, we as human beings are driven or drawn naturally to try to predict what our experience is going to be like when we’re buying a product or a service. It’s why so many of us, 96% plus look at reviews before we make a purchase of medium to high consideration that we’ve never bought before. And 82% of us specifically seek out the negative reviews, first. We hear the marketing, we hear the pitch we’re trying to get, they’re real good vision of what our experience is really going to be like, which is why we trust negative reviews. We can read them, look at them and say, “All right, this applies to me, or this doesn’t apply to me?” When everything is painted as perfect. We as buyers, as consumers are actually drawn to do more homework, to go explore and investigate beyond the claims of the organization and of their sellers. It’s a matter of fact, in 2017 Gardner put out a study that looked at buyers and what they do during a buying process and as it turns out, only 39% of their time is spent talking to you, talking to your competitors or talking to their internal buying groups. As it turns out, 61% of their time it’s spent investigating other ways, talking to references, talking to friends who might have experienced in your product category, going and looking at reviews and the tech space. There’s companies like G2 Crowd and Trust Radius that these organizations or these buyers are looking at. And now with Glassdoor, they’re actually trying to look at what is your culture like because they’re not just buying a product from you, they’re buying your people. And I’m willing to bet that if you go to Google right now and write down what is it like to work at and then put in your company, the first thing that’ll pop up are Glassdoor reviews, which is really, really interesting. So when thinking about our proposals, are we creating the perception that our products are perfect and our proposals. I know that was a lot of P’s there, but unfortunately, proposals, the way they’ve historically been written are written as though our products are perfect and only paint a positive picture to make proposals really valuable to a buyer. Paint the picture of what you might not be good at, what they’re not going to get as a part of their investment that they’re making. What might a little bit lacking at this point? Maybe even post some positive and negative reviews and your proposals. From a brain science perspective, we know it works. I would love for you to try it because knowing the brain science around how decision making happens when we paint a picture of perfection, we actually push people away when we frame our products as imperfect. When we are transparent about our flaws, we draw people in, we build trust, and we speed sales cycles. That’s 61% that Gartner talked about is not a foregone conclusion if you’re giving the buyer everything they need, which I believe can take place in proposals as well as every human to human conversation that you have. So give it a try. I would love to hear how it goes and good luck!
Scott Ingram: Now do yourself a favor and follow Todd on LinkedIn and go get your own copy of The Transparency Sale. You’ll find links to do both of those things and you can see the video version of this tip at DailySales/Tips/319
Then be sure to listen tomorrow for the final part of Jeff Bajorek’s 16 part You Don’t Have a Closing Problem series. Thanks for listening!